A glorious melodrama written by Mizoguchi collaborator Yoshikata Yoda. A successful, kindly textile industrialist cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavory assignment and treats him with brash tenderness. The grateful businessman falls madly in love with her, and sets out to purchase her freedom. When faced with her betrayal and his own financial ruin, he takes revenge, turning the lavish ceremony to mark Tamarazu's ascension to courtesan into a slashing spectacle spattered with cherry blossoms and blood. The script's taut determinism, with its interlocked rise (hers) and fall (his), and teeming social detail; the dynamism of the color cinematography; and the remarkably ambiguous characters of the besotted businessman and bluff, grasping whore-reminiscent of one of Imamura's enterprising insect women-make Yoshiwara look like some kind of lost classic.